The Freedom From Religion Foundation slams today’s Supreme Court decision that dismisses Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit against South Carolina for removing its clinics from the list of approved Medicaid providers.
The Supreme Court decided 6-3 in Medina v. Planned Parenthood of Southeast Atlantic that Planned Parenthood of the Southeast Atlantic and its patients cannot sue states under the Civil Rights Act for rights arising from the Medicaid Act.
South Carolina admitted early during the eight-year litigation that Planned Parenthood of Southeast Atlantic was a qualified provider for Medicaid care, but because it provides abortion care, it was targeted and removed from the list of qualified providers. Planned Parenthood won several times, including an early certiorari denial before the Supreme Court and three wins before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Unfortunately, this time the Supreme Court has shut the door on Planned Parenthood and the millions of women who rely on state insurance to access family planning services.
South Carolina’s Christian nationalist officials have used every tool at their disposal to sabotage abortion access. Now, with the Supreme Court’s help, they’ve succeeded in denying patients their choice of provider — not based on quality of care, but based purely on religiously motivated opposition to abortion. South Carolina was represented by the Christian nationalist outfit, the Alliance Defending Freedom.
In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson lays out why the judgment is both disastrous and plainly wrong: “Today’s decision is likely to result in tangible harm to real people. At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them. And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians — and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country — of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.’”
“The ruling is alarming not just for reproductive rights, but for government accountability,” says Liz Cavell, deputy legal director at the Freedom From Religion Foundation. “FFRF has long opposed efforts by Christian nationalist officials to impose their religious beliefs through government policy. When states strip access to qualified providers for ideological reasons, there must be a legal remedy. The court’s decision undermines both the rights of patients and the secular principles our Constitution is meant to protect.”
Adds FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor: “This decision shows just how far the Supreme Court is willing to go to accommodate Christian nationalism and its anti-abortion base. We’re watching the demolition of the separation of state and church in real time — and the people hurt the most are women and marginalized patients who need reproductive care. Religious dogma should never determine who can access public health services.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 42,000 members nationwide, including hundreds of members in South Carolina. FFRF’s purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between church and state, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
